


Some thoughts on Queequeg, the harpooner, my friend, my everything.

by pocketsizedquasar



Category: Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Genre: Falling In Love, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Oblivious Ishmael!, Pining, Pining Ishmael!, Suicidal Thoughts, and working to figure that out, basically ishmael being a dork who's very very in love with his harpooner husband, but like so small youd have to squint, mostly fluff tho, very very very slight cw for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-24 21:26:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22024699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pocketsizedquasar/pseuds/pocketsizedquasar
Summary: Just a sappy and extremely self-indulgent series of short, disconnected blurbs from a very enamored Ishmael, trying to figure out this whole "in love with my best friend" thing.
Relationships: Ishmael/Queequeg (Moby Dick)
Comments: 20
Kudos: 52





	Some thoughts on Queequeg, the harpooner, my friend, my everything.

**Author's Note:**

> Companion piece to [this](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23202370)

I am still getting accustomed to being loved. Or, rather, loved so openly. The love I have known has been of the stifled, dutiful variety, the kind of obligations and piety, the kind of Sunday morning churches and stepmothers and window curtains and a sort of familial necessity. The love I have known is quiet and smothered in riddle and rule and reason. 

The love he gives to me is different. I do not know what to do with all of it. He is beautifully unapologetic. Terrifyingly unapologetic. When he loves he loves loud, proud, like he wants the world to know, and there is... there is just so _much_ of it. It makes me want to give him the same. 

It is good, I think. It is good for me. He is good for me.

\--

Waking up in his arms is the best feeling in the world.

\--

In hindsight, it took me far too long to realize he loved me.

He did not, in his words, make any effort to hide his affection. 

It is a little ironic, I think — that I was making extreme exertions to conceal what I felt for him, from everyone, including myself; that I took, really, an inordinate amount of time to realize that I even felt anything at all; and that despite all my best efforts to the contrary, I was, as he gently hinted, quite obvious (worryingly so, if other members of the crew were to catch on) in my sentiments towards him. And then on the other hand he, on all accounts, _wanted_ me to know, and I simply...obliviously blundered along. Thinking us friends and nothing more. Wanting more.

Poetic irony, I suppose. 

And, again, in retrospect, I really should have recognized it earlier. 

I suppose I just didn’t know that love could look like that.

\--

Someday he will be able to kiss me without me flinching.

Maybe someday I will finally bring myself to kiss him first.

_An addendum: it is not him that I am afraid of. Maybe it is what I feel for him, trite as that may sound. I am not sure. But I could never be afraid of him._

\--

I thought it was supposed to be wrong. I’m not sure, now.

\--

He couldn’t be wrong. He is – he is perfect, he is _good_ , he is everything good in my life. 

If he wants this too then I have to believe it must be okay.

\--

He loves me. I know this, now. 

I once doubted that he did, but it is, truly, difficult to. He makes it impossible to forget; he loves like summer storms and crashing waves and daybreak, overwhelming and bright and present. You cannot doubt a thunderstorm; it will not let you. 

I still—I still question why, but I have never pretended to understand him, and in this, he is no exception.

He loves me. And I

I feel the same way.

I can’t even admit it to myself.

I know it, I just

It terrifies me.

I’m getting there. 

\--

I have never— I do not know what it is to call someone mine. But he says it, so sincerely, says to me _“I am yours”_ in that low, soft voice of his, and I— I believe him. 

I do not feel that I should get to call him mine. I don’t know that I deserve this, this wonderful thing. But he has given himself to me all the same. And so he is mine. 

Of course I am his. I have been his from the first. 

\--

I am lucky—or we are lucky, I suppose—for Tashtego and Daggoo, and their friendship, and their silence. 

According to Queequeg, they have known about—about him and me for some time. Longer than even I have known, he noted, with some irony. Apparently they had had a running bet on how long we would take to—how long it would take him to tell me.

Tash lost. 

Regardless, they have kept quiet, outside of the four of us. Which. Is appreciated. 

We have a small sort of system, of alternating watches, when it is needed. The two of them, the two of us. On deck, or in the harpooners’ quarters, down in the steerage. Back and forth.

And they have been good to me. They have always been good to Queequeg, of course—the friendship between the three of them is tight and close and long-standing and is not one I have ever understood, from the outside. But they have, slowly, let me join them. Let me sit with them, out of place as I am, let me laugh and smoke and talk with them. On deck, or down below with them. It’s likely that, at first, this acceptance was only given on Queequeg’s behalf, a begrudging tolerance of my presence in deference to him, but I’d like to think that now there is something more here, something a little closer to friendship. I have never really had friends quite like them, but truly, I do not think I would want anything else.

We are joined by a different kind of love, the four of us. And it is wonderful.

\--

He is — so unbelievably good, so good to me, so good for me. I only hope that I can be even a fraction of that for him. I want to be good for him. He does so much, he gives and gives to everyone and he expects nothing in return. I want to give something back to him. He deserves the world and I want to be the person who gives that to him. Somehow he finds that in me. When he looks at me he looks like he sees _everything_. 

I will spend the rest of my life trying to prove myself worthy of that. 

\--

He is made for sunshine, I swear it. Or sunshine is made for him. 

The sunlight parsed through the rigging, filtered through sailcloth, dazzling off the waves, all of it. God’s first creation, so carefully and tenderly pulled from nothing on that first day, perfectly fitted to my Queequeg’s glittering eyes, diligently and earnestly designed to soak into his lovely skin. Let there be light! the Lord must have said, but that wasn’t enough. Let there be light, and let there be Queequeg, forged to complete it.

He is beautiful in the sunlight. He is beautiful always, but sometimes Apollo's loving radiance frames him just... just so, and it is almost painful to look at him, he glows so much.

\--

Rarely in my life have I felt real.

I know that may sound strange, but I truly do spend most of my waking hours feeling disembodied, feeling superfluous, an aberration in the grand and ineffable scheme of things. It may be silly, and indeed it has been at best an inconvenience and at worst a detriment to my general wellbeing — I will often forget my own needs, forget that I am supposed to eat and sleep and drink and take care of myself. It is so dangerously easy for me to forget my own self, forget that I am real, tangible, corporeal. 

I never seem to have this problem when he is near. He laces his fingers through mine and I remember that I have hands, that I can touch and feel and hold and be held. I remember what it is to be alive, to have a body and a mind and a beating, throbbing heart, to be not just in this world but _of_ it. 

When he touches me, I feel real. Like he is giving me back myself. Making me new.

\--

When he kisses me I lose everything, I forget everything, I forget all that I am and all that I have shaped myself into being and all that I am supposed to be. I forget everything but him, the smell of him, the warmth of him, his hands on me and his smile made of sunshine and his lovely dark coffee-brown eyes.

Kissing him is the best feeling in the world.

\--

It is funny what almost dying (over and over and over again) will do to your doubts.

\--

I love him.

  
  


_God_ , I love him. 

\--

I am in love with Queequeg. 

\--

Perhaps I will tell him. 

He knows, I’m sure. He must. But he deserves to hear it said. I only wish I could have brought myself to before now. 

\-- 

How could I have possibly gotten so lucky?

How did this happen? How did I set out, empty and alone in this world, on this damning voyage, really only doing so to spare myself from the alternative, and end up—end up whole, end up loved, loving, as-good-as married? 

I was — I was so ready to die on this ship. I was prepared to die on this ocean, on these waves, bury myself in the currents and the callous calls of faraway sea hawks. 

And now?

My dear reader, I still do not know how I chanced upon this fortune. 

Most days he awakens first, and I fall out of sleep into him, his arms, his chest, his lips, and for those first few waking moments my whole world is nothing but him. But some rare mornings, I wake up before him, and I simply get to _look_ , to carve his face into my memory for the hundredth time, trace over his features with an idle finger while the light scatters into the room from the deck prism above us. And I am so _unbelievably_ lucky. He will wake soon after, and his face will break into that radiant smile and he will kiss me, or I will kiss him, kiss the sleep from his face till he sits up, back curled beneath the low frame of the top bunk above him, smiling down at me and rolling his eyes at my antics. And my whole world is him. 

\--

I have never been afraid to die, before this. 

How terrible and wonderful it is, to have a reason to be afraid of death.

\--

It is hard to be certain of the future on a whaleship. Especially this one. It is hard to truly be certain of anything, really — the days and miles blur together, their monotony only punctuated by short bursts of high intensity and danger, and I am never _completely_ sure of where or when we are. There is always some modem of doubt.

I do not know what this voyage has in store for us. For me, for our captain, for Mr. Starbuck, for our friends, for my dear Queequeg. The uncertainty is not just mine, I'm sure — few admit it, but it grows ever more palpable, ever more present, hanging low in the fo'c'sle and tangling itself in the rigging and making itself known in the sighing of the ship and her movings and her moanings. 

This ocean, this ship, and my want of them both brought me to my Queequeg, but they may yet take him away from me and the thought of that is 

I know it is no use worrying. Really, even, no use hoping. But I do anyways. I worry for my Queequeg, my brave Queequeg. I worry for my friends. For our captain. I hope for us. 

It is little comfort, but perhaps it can be enough. 

It is hard to be certain of anything, out here. On this ship. On this ocean. 

All I know is that I love him. I will spend the rest of my life loving him. 

**Author's Note:**

> It's maybe not the most popular way of reading the two of them and how their relationship progresses, but I really like the more slow-burn, long-term pining way of thinking of Ishmael & Queequeg. I like the idea of them sort of slowly opening up to each other and getting more comfortable around each other, rather than them being together right from the start; it makes more sense to me, both in terms of just...how people work, but also in terms of being more in line with (imo) their characters.  
> I also just love a soft pining doofus of an Ishmael, so.  
> (also i probably will write a companion piece to this from Queequeg's perspective so look out for that ig. Happy new year!)  
> EDIT: I DO have a companion piece from queequeg now! [Here it is!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23202370)


End file.
